Xbox Series X issues with HDR. (A fix here that might help others))

[Ravens Nest]

I Bought a cheap QLED TCL 4K 55" it has Dolby Atmos, Dolby vision, HDR plus it has been an absolute bargain for the money £350 with a 5 year warranty too.

The Series X looks and sounds amazing on it, I used the Calibration tool for it and the separate one after for the HDR really happy with the purchase (except for a few quirks it has its been great)

I did come on to two problems with it, which I had me stumped for ages....

Dolby Vision gaming looks stunning but latency is not good so gave up with that so back to HDR but I kept having a strange problem where sometimes I would boot up the game and it would look stunning then the next time I would boot it up and it looked bad like foggy blurry and too much HDR.

Finally the fix that took ages for me to work out, If I turned off Auto HDR in the settings of the Xbox HDR now looks nearly as good as Dolby Vision and now has very low latency as well via "Auto Low Latency Mode" (ALLM)!

I am well happy!! Just hope this might help anyone who has had the same problem.

[SubCog]

I had to fiddle with my tv settings, and I think I also had to bypass my hdmi hub, and use a different hdmi cable. Once I got it all figured out, it did make a big improvement in image quality. But yeah, if you don't have the whole pipeline HDR compliant, it makes the image WAAAY worse. Like colors over-saturated, sky is blown out, etc. When you get the whole pipeline right, you'll know.

[Ravens Nest]

I had to fiddle with my tv settings, and I think I also had to bypass my HDMI hub, and use a different HDMI cable. Once I got it all figured out, it did make a big improvement in image quality. But yeah, if you don't have the whole pipeline HDR compliant, it makes the image WAAAY worse. Like colors over-saturated, sky is blown out, etc. When you get the whole pipeline right, you'll know.

You had to use a new HDMI cable is that with the Series X?

It definitely is worth the effort using the display calibration and getting the brightness, black level and contrast correct.

I found that turning every image enhancement off like filtering, motion, judder, dynamic contrast off first then getting the brightness so the eye is invisible and the contrast so the sun is nearly invisible then doing the HDR after then when I got that as good as I could then I slowly turned the other settings back on was the trick.

Also after calibration of the brightness black level, and contrast then I looked at the black level and contrast again a couple of times to fine tune each as they do effect one another.

Gamma as the final tweak from after doing the brightness (on my TV its black level) and contrast.

[SubCog]

You had to use a new HDMI cable is that with the Series X?

You don't necessarily need to use the included cable, but keep in mind that HDMI cables are finicky. You need to get one that can pass an HDMI 2.1 signal. However, there's no difference in the wiring of the cable, only the quality of the materials. Thus an older cable might work fine, if it is well built and not very long.

Like I said, you need to make sure your entire pipeline can support HDMI 2.1.
Any point of failure will make your image look terrible. I had to bypass my HDMI switch, as it didn't support 2.1. And it's possible that your TV only has a single HDMI 2.1 compatible port, so keep that in mind too. And then you have to make sure the proper tv settings are enabled for that port.

I have my xbox series s plugged directly into one HDMI port on my tv, and then I have my Switch and xbox 360 plugged into an old HDMI switch that then feeds into a separate HDMI port on the tv.

It definitely is worth the effort using the display calibration and getting the brightness, black level and contrast correct.

I had been messing with alot of tv settings too, trying to make the picture look right. For me, I found that once I ensured my HDMI 2.0 pipeline was working and HDR enabled, the picture looked great and I didn't mess with calibration further.